The lamentable state of the Fourth Estate in increasingly brittle and would-be democratic polities

 

“Can Journalism Be Saved?”
Nicholas Lemann for The New York Review of Books (February 27, 2020) 

   

Lemann more or less discusses fourteen books in this review essay! It is quite good, indeed, indispensable for a timely, critical overview of contemporary journalism.

“What has happened in journalism in the twenty-first century is a version, perhaps an extreme one, of what has happened in many fields. A blind faith that market forces and new technologies would always produce a better society has resulted in more inequality, the heedless dismantling of existing arrangements that had real value, and a heightened gap in influence, prosperity, and happiness between the dominant cities and the provinces. The political implications of this are painfully obvious, in the United States and elsewhere: in journalism, the poorer, the more nativist, the angrier parts of the country (which vote accordingly) are the ones where journalism can’t deliver on its public promise because of its severe economic constraints. Journalism is a case in which it’s going to take a whole new set of arrangements, and a new way of thinking, to solve the present crisis.”

   
The full article is here.

   
(It seems there are a few more titles I will need to add to the mass media bibliography!)

 

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